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🔗 Fire Service

A Halligan bar (also known as a Halligan tool or Hooligan tool) is a forcible entry tool used by firefighters.

🔗 Germany 🔗 Anthroponymy

In German, Kevinismus ("Kevinism") is the negative preconception German people have of Germans with trendy, exotic-sounding first names considered to be an indicator of a low social class. The protypical example is Kevin, which like most such names came to Germany from Anglo-American culture. Sometimes Chantalismus ("Chantalism") is used as a female equivalent, from the French name Chantal.

🔗 Law 🔗 Statistics 🔗 United Kingdom

R v Adams [1996] EWCA Crim 10 and 222, are rulings in the United Kingdom that banned the expression in court of headline (soundbite), standalone Bayesian statistics from the reasoning admissible before a jury in DNA evidence cases, in favour of the calculated average (and maximal) number of matching incidences among the nation's population. The facts involved strong but inconclusive evidence conflicting with the DNA evidence, leading to a retrial.

🔗 Books

Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985) is a book by educator Neil Postman. The book's origins lay in a talk Postman gave to the Frankfurt Book Fair in 1984. He was participating in a panel on George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and the contemporary world. In the introduction to his book, Postman said that the contemporary world was better reflected by Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, whose public was oppressed by their addiction to amusement, rather than by Orwell's work, where they were oppressed by state control.

Postman's book has been translated into eight languages and sold some 200,000 copies worldwide. In 2005, Postman's son Andrew reissued the book in a 20th anniversary edition.

🔗 Computing

The Texas Instruments LPC Speech Chips are a series of speech synthesizer digital signal processor integrated circuits created by Texas Instruments beginning in 1978. They continued to be developed and marketed for many years, though the speech department moved around several times within TI until finally dissolving in late 2001. The rights to the speech-specific subset of the MSP line, the last remaining line of TI speech products as of 2001, were sold to Sensory, Inc. in October 2001.

🔗 Biology 🔗 Insects 🔗 Ecology

A hyperparasite, also known as a metaparasite is a parasite whose host, often an insect, is also a parasite, often specifically a parasitoid. Hyperparasites are found mainly among the wasp-waisted Apocrita within the Hymenoptera, and in two other insect orders, the Diptera (true flies) and Coleoptera (beetles). Seventeen families in Hymenoptera and a few species of Diptera and Coleoptera are hyperparasitic. Hyperparasitism developed from primary parasitism, which evolved in the Jurassic period in the Hymenoptera. Hyperparasitism intrigues entomologists because of its multidisciplinary relationship to evolution, ecology, behavior, biological control, taxonomy, and mathematical models.

🔗 Lists 🔗 Psychology

A list of 'effects' that have been noticed in the field of psychology.

🔗 Africa 🔗 Geology 🔗 Archaeology 🔗 Africa/Mauritania

The Richat Structure, also called Guelb er Richât (Arabic: قلب الريشات, romanized: Qalb ar-Rīšāt), is a prominent circular geological feature in the Sahara's Adrar Plateau, near Ouadane, west–central Mauritania, Northwest Africa. In the local dialect, Richat means feather and it also is known locally in Arabic as tagense. Tagense refers to the circular opening of the leather pouch used to draw water from local wells.

It is an eroded geological dome, 40 kilometres (25 mi) in diameter, exposing sedimentary rock in layers which appear as concentric rings. Igneous rock is exposed inside and there are spectacular rhyolites and gabbros which have undergone hydrothermal alteration, and a central megabreccia. The structure is also the location of exceptional accumulations of Acheulean archaeological artifacts.

🔗 Mathematics

The Berry paradox is a self-referential paradox arising from an expression like "The smallest positive integer not definable in under sixty letters" (a phrase with fifty-seven letters).

Bertrand Russell, the first to discuss the paradox in print, attributed it to G. G. Berry (1867–1928), a junior librarian at Oxford's Bodleian Library. Russell called Berry "the only person in Oxford who understood mathematical logic". The paradox was called "Richard's paradox" by Jean-Yves Gerard".

🔗 Food and drink 🔗 Ireland

The Dublin whiskey fire took place on 18 June 1875 in the Liberties area of Dublin. It lasted a single night but killed 13 people, and resulted in €6 million worth of damage in whiskey alone (adjusted for inflation). People drank the 6 inches (150 mm) deep river of whiskey that is said to have flowed as far as the Coombe. None of the fatalities suffered during the fire were due to smoke inhalation, burns, or any other form of direct contact with the fire itself; all of them were attributed to alcohol poisoning.